Untying the Mystique of an Islamic Threat: Western Imageries,the Clash of Civilizations,and a Search for Ontological Security

Introduction

Western imagery of Islam and the Muslim world has been a product of a singular monovalent perspective which is founded upon a prejudiced and textured reading of the religio-cultural trajectories of Islam. The tendentiousness of this reading lies in an epistemology of semantic and semiotic de-contextualization, through which it attempts at linking the violent behavior of Muslims to the canonical, theological, liturgical, and juridical aspects of their faith. Such imagery gets into expeditious circulation because of Western endeavors at producing knowledge on transnational terrorism through a systematic engagement in the divisive politics of labeling. In this process, the discursive formations of the truth disseminated to the wider global audience as a discourse tends to get manufactured as a desired commodity through the interaction between knowledge claims and power structures (Jackson 2005: 18–20).

The politics of labeling itself manifests in the structured attempts of the West to depict acts of apocalyptical terrorism carried out by Muslims, as a dependent variable derived out of the mono-causal influence of the transcendent scriptural and ritualistic contours of Islam. Such an endeavor is also backed up by a contention that the solutions to the problem of theistic extremism among Muslims lie nowhere outside but can be explored within the religion of Islam. Owing to this, the notion that Islam is a religion that condones violence in the name of god got deeply embedded in the demotic consciousness of the common populous in the West (Singer 2006: 417). As a product of such perceptions, Islam and violence got imbricated into a complex whirlpool of negativities, and it began to be projected as the ultimate nemeses of the West. Subsequently, the image of Islam in the demotic opinion started to emerge as that of a negative millennial force that was pitted against a righteous liberal West. For instance, in 2006, a Washington Post/ABC News survey showed that nearly half of the Americans (46%) had a negative image of Islam and in Europe; Islam was overwhelmingly singled out as a religion prone to violence (Esposito 2010: 12).

Such kind of an aesthetic distaste which is accompanied by a total absence of trust toward an entire community has emerged even as the real essence of the religion of Islam since its inception embodies within it the idea of world peace (Asad 1980: 179). Indeed, Islam means peace (Mohamad 1997: 667–668). The Quran and the Sunnah provide a theology of peace, for living in a world of diverse nations and peoples (Esposito 2002: 29). However, Western discourse on transnational terrorism, situated upon the foundations of the politics of branding a particular community as violent, fails to place the epistemology of terrorism itself in the wider context of the ontological and methodological dimensions of examining the connection between political violence and social movements (Sluka 2008: 182). The discourse linking terrorism and Islam then presents a picture of violence and terrorism only through the lens of the religion of Islam and the deviant social behavior of its believers, in complete negligence of the neutrality of the phenomenon of violence and terrorism to any particular religious-cultural context (Burke 2008: 39).

Western portrayal of transnational Islam, hence, appears as a reductionist representation of the same, as nothing more than a movement for terrorism (Milton-Edwards 2006: 10). Such portrayals are oblivious of the sociopolitical and psychological variables that factor deeply in the making of diverse strands of terrorism (Jackson 2007: 246). Founded upon such kind of ignorance, academics in the West have made a reductionist reading of Islam by framing it merely in terms of fundamentalism, and in turn, fundamentalism itself has been understood by them as extremism. Situated in the secular reading of faith which has its origin in the post-enlightenment Europe, such reductionism represents a new and more vicious form of orientalism that presents cultures as static monoliths (Esposito 1999: 199–200, 202). By arriving at such understandings, it also dismantled the everyday experiences of Muslims from their specific spatial-cultural ontologies (Amin 1996).

Situating ourselves in this context, the first part of this article begins by deconstructing the genealogy of the theologocentric character of the demonization of Islam. This according to the article is done by Western Islamophobic critiques, who are engaged in a constant process of dissemination of the concocted narratives on Islam as a culture and civilization. The article argues here that such a narrative is represented by the ideas of Samuel Huntington on the attributes of Islamic civilization and the political vocabulary of its cultural interactions with the Western civilization. Such an Islamophobic discourse that tends to demonize Islam as a religion and culture is centered around an epistemic conviction that Islam and violence are inextricably intertwined with each other because the religion is still sedimented in medieval barbarism. This part also indicates that Huntington’s ideas in turn are founded upon West’s own liminal anxiety regarding its ontological security which is linked up to the security problematique defined in the context of the cultural predicament of sustainability encountered by the West as a civilization. According to this Western discourse, beneath such precariousness concerning its security, lie the culture and religion of Islam that emerge as the ultimate nemesis which threaten the very constitution of its civilizational ontology. This happens because unlike the West, Islam as a civilization is yet to graduate out of the syndrome of dogmatic mono-cultural assertiveness and a retrograding sense of conservative obstinacy.

On this count, the article contends that for the Western Islamophobic narrative, Islam with all its civilizational atavism and a sense of medieval dogmatic monoculturalism appears as an enemy of the modernized West that represents post-enlightenment values of liberal cosmopolitanism and multicultural accommodation. In the succeeding part, the article attempts to elaborate as to how the Western imagery of the Islamic civilization and Muslim society is a product of their long-standing prejudice that first manifested in the intellectual reactions in the form of orientalism and presently expresses itself in the metaphor of clash of civilizations. In the final part, the article tries to trace the roots of Huntington’s thesis of ‘the clash of civilizations’ in the ideas of Bernard Lewis. This part also argues that the theologocentric thesis of a violent and barbaric Islamic civilization that is responsible for global cultural frictions came to a full cycle in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. After this, the Huntingtonian logic of the civilizational conflict between the West and Islam gained considerable credence. The article concludes by stating that impelled by the global turbulence engendered by the constant presence of multiple strands of transnational jihadi movements, the ideas of Huntington and Lewis act as Foucauldian epistemes and contribute significantly in the discursive formulation of the negative discourse on Islam and Muslims.

Islamophobia, Demonization of Islam, and the War of Cultures

Islamophobia is a discourse that emanates out of Western imagination and subsequently leads to a widespread propaganda regarding the historical prejudices reproduced by the narration of the accounts relating to the crusades and it is this very notion of demonology of the Islamic evil that undergirds the constant process of negative image making of Islam and Muslims by the West. The notions about Islam and Muslims that emerge as a result of this is characterized by the placing of a sense of collective guilt on the entire Muslim community and the religion of Islam itself, for the actions of some fringe elements. Wrapped in a theologocentric attire, Western perspectives on Islam is yet to graduate out from its self-imposed knowledge deficit of viewing the Muslim community from only the religious perspective (Roy 1994: 2–3).

The major product of this deficit has been the fusion of the definition of the sociocultural and political space occupied by the Muslims with the realm of their theological beliefs. Rather than merely bracketing those Muslims who define their identity from the perspective of religion as an ideology, the West has engaged in the systematic process of demonization of Islam and held the entire Muslim populous responsible, for the current state of imponderables that the religion of Islam is being surrounded today (Fadl 2002: 3). Here, the popularization of the notion of Islamic terrorism constitutes what is called ‘demonization of Islam’. It has formed part of the ideational explanation to bolster the West’s strategy in the global war on transnational terrorism.

The term ‘demonization’ has extensively been used in religion since ancient times. It implies a process wherein one group, which acts as the proselytizer, questions and criticizes the faith of another. The questioning centers around condemning other’s god as a demon. In Christianity, the pagans are portrayed in this manner by the Christian missionaries. In modern times, the term demonization has also been used as a part of political strategy to defame opponents. It involves the process of creating moral panic against a particular group through constant hate propaganda.

If we attempt at the deconstruction of the genealogy and archeology of such strands of the demonization of Islam, the culturalist critique of Islam and the Muslim world done by Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis occupies a critical epistemological space. Huntington, in his 1993 article, had come up with the thesis ‘the clash of civilizations’, wherein he contemplated the cartography of the future world, carved out with deep imprints of what he called the culture wars. These culture wars for him would be situated in the context of religious fault lines that divide the world and engender inter-civilizational conflicts. Drawing upon a metaphor of cartographic spatiality while identifying these fault lines, he divided the world into eight prominent civilizations and argued that future conflicts would occur along the cultural cleavages separating these civilizations from one another (Huntington 1993: 25). Huntington developed his thesis by according a high degree of synonymy to religion and civilization. Although language, culture, history, and tradition were the common objective elements that held civilizations together, for Huntington, religion remained the most important factor.

Huntington claimed that culture and cultural identities shape the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world (Huntington 1996: 20). Through this statement, he sought to frame the nature of world politics in a transformational mode in which culture that symbolized a synecdoche for religion which was represented in its most negative connotation, assumed center-stage in world affairs. Through a geographic scaling of demographic categories and according each category with a distinct cultural archaeology, Huntington aimed to indicate that these cultural differences will lie at the root of all future conflicts. Huntington’s approach, thus, erected impervious boundaries between different cultures elevated to the status of civilizations and made religion the focal point of identity within cultures. This is not only an entirely inaccurate historical perspective on the construction of cultures and identities, but also reified and essentialized a category of religion (Barkey 2005: 6).

In any case, out of all the civilizations enumerated by Huntington, Islam has been singled out above all others, as being at the base of clash of civilizations that would occur in future. For Huntington, Islamic beliefs are the major source of cultural strain in the modern world, and the conflict between the cultures of Islam and the West would be at the focal point of his premonition pertaining to clash of civilizations (Acevedo 2008: 1711). This would happen for Huntington because historically, a conflict has existed between Islam and the West since 1300 years and this military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline (Huntington 1993: 29–32). In symphony with this dictum, Charles Krauthammer (1993) indicates that Islam has been the ancient enemy of Western values such as tolerance, liberal cosmopolitanism, and respect for universal human rights which are inherited from the Judeo-Christian heritage. These values persist in West’s secular democratic present, emerging out as the products of post-enlightenment rationality. However, in the conflict of cultures between Islam and the West, these values are challenged by the atavistic conservatism which is innate to the medieval barbarism of Islamic orthodoxy (Huntington 1996: 217). Owing to this, the believers of Islam and their political actions emerge as an existential predicament to the West. In turn, the West naturally would engage in this battle of values in pursuit of its own ontological security (Schimmel 1992: 1).

Further this conflict of values, for Huntington, would not remain at a subterranean level as mere polemics of cultural narrative. Rather, beneath the subterfuge of the very rhetoric of the conflict of cultures, Huntington visualizes imminent threats of overt physical violence that would be an actual part of this clash of civilizations. Hence, the conflict of cultures for Huntington is not limited to an elocutionary statement, and violence which has been the marrow and substance of the relationship between Islam and the West, would ultimately define their future civilizational interactions. In such an equation, the syndrome of violent behavior is an inherent component of Muslim psyche, owing to the medieval barbarism embodied in Islamic orthodoxy (Huntington 1996: 263). In pursuit of providing credence to his thesis which is founded upon the demonology of the Islamic evil, Huntington cites various examples of conflicts involving Muslims and other groups like the orthodox Serbs, Jews in Israel, and Hindus in India and ultimately concludes that Islam is a warlike religion and has bloody borders and also innards (Ibid.: 35).

The reading of Huntington’s ideas thus indicates that the subtext of his thesis lies in an unflinching conviction regarding the link between Islam and violence. Islamophobia arises out of Islam dubbed as a ‘warlike religion’. The argument was substantiated by Huntington by stating that Islam is not only at the epicenter of the clash of civilizations and thereby has bloody borders, but within the Islamic world, there is a lot of violence because Muslims fight among each other. He dubbed the contemporary era as the age of Muslim wars and listed a series of bloody crises. While doing this, he conveniently overlooked bloody crises like those in Rwanda and Kosovo. Further, he argued that September 11, 2001, was merely the extension of Muslim wars into America and these wars are rooted in the rise of Islamic consciousness. According to him, the overwhelming support given to the USA-led war on terrorism by the West, and as a contrast the lukewarm response expressed by the countries of the Muslim world to the same, confirmed his projections regarding the clash of civilizations (Huntington 2003: 13–15).

Responding to Huntington, Kishore Mahbubani has argued that Huntington seems to have forgotten that in conflicts between Muslims and the pro-Western forces, Muslims have lost, whether they are the Azeris, Palestinians, Iraqis, Iranians, or Bosnian Muslims. Oddly, for all this paranoia, the West seems almost to be deliberately pursuing a course designed to aggravate the Islamic world (Mahbubani 1993: 12). Huntington’s ideas thus are not merely anecdotal that lack any concrete historical context (Ahmed 2003), but his analysis also grossly tends to misrepresent conflicts caused by other factors as civilizational conflicts (Fox 2001: 460). According to Roy Mottahedeh, Huntington was rushing headlong into a region of the world whose history he knew little about (Mottahedeh 1995: 1).

Further, contrary to the prejudiced representations of Huntington, the religion of Islam has been very flexible, and it tends to adapt into different political systems (Roy 2007: 56). Viewed historically, the very expansion of Islamic empires was based upon a tolerant approach and a sense of responsibility to protect the religious beliefs of the non-Muslim population of the conquered territories. Such an approach, embodied in the Islamic principle of responsibility (dhimma), aptly counters Huntington’s allegations that Islam is a warlike religion with bloody borders (Marsot 1992: 158). This also corresponds to the moral and pragmatic foundations underlying the principle of reciprocity embodied in Islamic discourses known as the golden rule (mu’awada). It was evident in the way in which Islamic empires tended to expand their influence by borrowing the cultural vocabulary of the people whom they ruled and not by repressing them through the sword, subsequently, engendering tolerant and eclectic polities in those territories (Alam 2004: 1–25).

Such a treatment of the contemporary international order by Huntington, demonstrates two critical propositions. First, it shows his uncanny ability to evolve a discourse of politics and international relations in a manner that is directed toward the construction of a West-centric notion of global security. Huntington situates the process of such construction, on the circumstantial plank of the dilemma of ontological security experienced by States in an anarchical world order. While doing this, the very ontological sense of security that he is attempting to conceptualize is linked up to the security problematique defined in the context of the cultural predicament of sustainability encountered by the major world civilizations. Such precariousness, according to Huntington, emanates out of the mutual interactions among those civilizations which is considerably governed by a commonly felt intrinsic perception of insecurity. The notion of security of a civilization and the security of the State here, hence, become synonymous to each other. The resorting of Huntington to a structuralist logic embedded in cartographic fundamentalism for the purposes of delineating the spatial-cultural topography of the major global civilizations and then his endeavor at problematizing their interactions in terms of a culturally induced security competition, symbolizes his thrust on such kind of a synonymy.

Thus in accordance to this conceptualization, the security of West as a civilization is equivalent to security of the cartographic entities such as those States that are grouped under its territorial ambit. Here, Huntington’s analysis also demonstrates his conceptual ability to engage in a structural demarcation of the image of the most threatening predicament that such a conception of State’s security would be encountering. In this sense, for Huntington, the West in general and the USA in particular, the phenomenon of systemic anarchy that engenders a security threat, emanates from the Islamic world which represents a civilization that possesses a cultural identity which is distinct to that of the West. This implies that the particularistic notion of a State’s security, like the security of USA for instance, framed in terms of the neo-realist epistemology of a State-centric international system, becomes a synecdoche for the phenomenon of security of the broader Western civilization itself. However, unlike the neo-realist emphasis on the structuralist ontology of systemic anarchy, Huntington has attempted at conceptualizing the same, from the non-structuralist dimension of norms, values, and ethics. This non-structuralist abstraction that constitute the core of Huntington’s explanation of the nature of international system is characterized by a Manichean dichotomy between whatever is dubbed as the good Western values and, whatever is called as the evil ethics represented by the non-Western civilizations, especially the Islamic world.

Such a divide between the good Western civilization and bad Islamic civilization is understood from the perspective of West’s axiomatic claims of having the ownership of modernity and, Islamic civilization’s lack of access to the same. The ownership itself is underpinned by West’s claims of holding a superior value system as opposed to that of the Islamic world. This, according to the West, can be summed up in the Cartesian dualisms between objectivity and subjectivity, tradition and reason, or instrumental rationality versus teleology. In a Huntingtonian sense, the West possesses objectivity, the liberating power of reason (logos) and scientific rationality. The non-Western civilization like the Islamic world then, on their part, owns subjectivity, tradition (the shackles of mythos) and teleology (Davetak 1995: 27–28, 31).

Through an accentuation of this kind of Western celebration of rational positivism, Huntington uses a notion of ‘epistemic violence’, to portray the biggest threat to Western civilization (Spivak 2000: 1438–1439). Such a threat, for Huntington, emerges from an alien civilization which does not share Western values, norms, and ethics. International competition in this sense is not measured in terms of the materialist calculus of power, but, a normative abstraction of the value system. Anarchy then for Huntington is not an independent variable which is defined as a systemic ontology in terms of the structuralist epistemology of neo-realism. Rather, it is a dependent variable, rooted in an abstract non-materialist ontology pertaining to the contest of cultural identities which he defines in terms of the notion of civilization. For Huntington, civilizations are the most advanced expression of cultural groupings and the broadest level of cultural identity, with each civilization differentiated from the other most importantly on the basis of religion. In this perspective, each civilization also manifests as distinct security community (Huntington 1996: 207).

On this count, Huntington’s portrait of the international order is that of a dystopian cultural heterotopia that comprise of competing civilizations, with each having a fixed and immutable cultural identity. Such identities for him could be associated with the fixity of political territoriality within which they are situated. This model of international order imagined by Huntington becomes anarchical, owing to the competition that is rooted in the contest of cultural identities among cartographically delineated civilizations. The security problemetique of every civilization hence emanates out of that very cultural competition that may then assume overtones of a geo-strategic contest (Neumayer and Plumper 2009: 711). In this manner Huntington attempted to reframe Cold War’s cultural model of bipolarity (Harshe 2006: 3947), by problematizing a united fundamentalist Islamic force as the biggest existential predicament (Bouchats 2002: 339). To put this in the words of Edward Said, in Huntington’s work, the Cold War paradigm of contest of civilizations, which was framed in terms of the West versus the rest, not only remained untouched but got reformulated as a new axiom to visualize the contest of multiple polarities in the context of the contemporary dispensation of the international order (Said 2001: 11). Islam, in this manner, replaced communism as the new global menace and emerged as the prime threat to the ontological security of the West (Esposito 1994: 19). This post-Cold War peril that Huntington framed in terms of the tyranny of his false vision of the clash of civilizations also generated in the West, shrilling calls for a greater politico-strategic preparedness to deal with such an imminent battle of ideas (Said 2003: 70). Thus, the religious lexicon embedded in the negative discourse on Islam and Muslims, emerged as a didactic convenience for the politico-military policy makers in the West to advance their post-Cold War grand strategies (Roy 2002: 124–137).

In addition to this, accepting Huntington’s portrayal of Islamic world as the only spatio-cultural expression which is a home to communities representing competing interests (evident in his description of Islam as a culture that has bloody borders and inards or, epitomized in his metaphor of the age of Muslim wars), would amount to viewing history in synchronic terms. Such an imagery also symbolizes a kind of presentist use of history and leads to a reductionist assessment of violence as being a culture-specific phenomenon. It would then produce a parochialized epistemology of conflict that gets subjected to a methodology that is founded upon the ontic interface between culture and violence. However, violence has been an intrinsic part of the process of development of human civilization (Pinker 2011). This condition was pervasive and was not inhibited by barriers of time and space because violence was an inevitable part of human existence which was a product of the ontological desire for power among humans (Hobbes 1991: 61–62).

As all human actions are located in a will to power (Nietzsche 1967), the very phenomenon of violence as an integral part of human condition, also lies at the bottom of the structuration of the vocabulary of modern politics including that of the State (Skinner 1978, 1996). Modernity, on its part, not only aestheticized the violent ontology of human behavior (Nietzsche 1989), but the condition of modernity also engendered the most powerful form of organized human life that is the centralized State and has bestowed upon it, the authority to engage in organized violence in the name of self-survival (Anderson 1974). The modern state itself in the words of Charles Tilly not only emerged as a result of war but also constantly engaged in producing war for its own existence. Owing to this, violence itself has been foundational in the process of making of the modern state (Tilly 1975). Hence, Huntington’s attempt to single out the territorialized Islamic culture and faith as the only spatialization of the ontology of violent human behavior emerges to be a misnomer that is embodied in an anomalous representation of civilizational histories itself.

Most crucially, the strict hermetic categorization of cultural identities into a monolithic ontology done by Huntington completely undermines the existence of multiple ontologies of cultural identity in a globalized multicultural world (Rubenstein and Crocker 1994: 113). In the globalized spatial-temporal epoch, cultural identities are neither sedimentary nor intransigent, but they are considerably exposed to the disembeding mechanisms of the spatial geography of a postmodern cosmology. Islamic cultural identity, in this sense, has also emerged to be eclectic to outside influences, and hence, Muslims have not been cartographically stagnated into any specific Islamic geography. But, they have been assimilated into cosmopolitan cosmologies engendered by the transformative power of globalization, indicating that cultural identity of Muslims is not merely connected to the civilizational ontology of Islam as it has been suggested by Huntington. Rather, it is conditioned by diverse factors that are embedded in multiple locational ontologies in which Muslims are situated.

Hence, the ontological link that Huntington connects between Islam and violence emerges to be an empty signifier because of the rapidly diffusing cultural spaces under globalization. Violence thus in this sense does not merely emanate out of a singular monolithic source such as religion. Rather, complex multilayered socioeconomic, psycho-cultural, and political factors contribute toward the manufacturing of the violent human behavior which are not specific to any particular community (Roy 2005: 361). The Huntingtonian epistemology that is oblivious to such a syndrome of conflict due to its over reliance on the ontology of Islam, thus, fails to recognize the problems of integration, development, and the psycho-social constraints that has led to the budding of home grown Islamic extremists in the West (Leiken 2005: 121).

Thus, instead of treating Islamic fundamentalism as a methodology to understand terrorism, Huntington has preferred to engage with it as ontology to explain and understand the same, totally devitalizing the necessity of methodological and disciplinary pluralism that is essential for the study of terrorism (Jackson 2009: 68). While doing this, he not only homogenizes Muslims into the totalizing framework of a monolithic grand narrative of Islam but also considers the terms such as Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism, the Arabs, and the Middle East, as being synonymous to each other (Esposito 1994: 24). Hence, Huntington’s works, when looked in terms of providing testable assumptions for his grand paradigm of ‘the clash of civilizations, has been charged as being infected with methodological ambiguity and epistemological confusion’ (Fox 2005; Henderson and Tucker 2001). In response to Huntington’s thesis, Said wrote, ‘Why do you opinion civilizations into so unyielding an embrace, and why do you then go on to describe their relationship as one of basic conflict, as if the borrowing and overlapping between them is not a much more interesting and significant feature?’ (Said 2003: 82).

Genealogies of the Huntingtonian Imagery of the Muslim World

Samuel Huntington has not come up with any novel base of anti-Muslim propaganda. The Western imagery of the Islamic civilization and Muslim society is a product of their long-standing prejudice that first manifested in the intellectual reactions in the form of orientalism and presently expresses itself in the metaphor of clash of civilizations. The Western envisionment perceived the Muslim world as a menace, much before it was actually seen as a problem (Rodinson 1987: 3). According to Hourani, since its birth Islam was a problem for Christian Europe, so, they looked at Muslims with a mixture of fear and bewilderment and rejected Muhammad as a genuine prophet, denied Allah as god and also the authenticity of the revelations given to Prophet Muhammad. With this, they contended that Islam was a false religion, invented by men whose character was deplorable, and was propagated by force (Hourani 1991: 7–10). The genealogies of such processes of negative image making can be traced to the age of crusades. During the middle ages, Christian propaganda warfare portrayed Islam as a misguided form of Christianity (Said 1977: 61–62). Further Islam was placed in the profane history while Judaism and Christianity in the sacred by the codification of Islam in d’Herbelot’s Bibliothéque Orientale (Ibid.: 64–71). Similarly, questioning the genuineness of Muhammad’s prophethood, Peter, the Venerable in the twelfth century, reviled the prophet Muhammad as an imposter (Akhavi 2003: 552).

Holding on to this line, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Muhammad was condemned to the eighth circle of hell and was called as the disseminator of scandals and schisms (Lewis 1960: 48). The thirteenth-century crusader and polemicist, Oliver of Paderborn, claimed that Islam began by the sword, was maintained by the sword and by the sword, would be ended (Daniel 1960: 127). The nineteenth-century French intellectual Francois Rene De Chatteaubrand, while describing the religion of Islam, designated it as a cult which is a civilization’s enemy, systematically favorable to ignorance, to despotism, and to slavery (Armstrong 1991: 39). Such an understanding was marked by the Eurocentric prejudice toward the Arabo-Islamic people and their culture (Said 1977: 56). This prejudice viewed Muslims and Islam as static in both time and space, incapable of defining themselves as compared to the West which was considered to be a dynamic, innovative, and expanding culture (Ibid.).

The process of construction of such a negative civilizational discourse has survived since then, consistently shaping the Western imaginary of Islam. Presently, it manifests in the politics of adverse representation which has been part of Western Islamophobic discourse predicated on a strong conviction that there is an ontological connection between Islam and violence. The epistemic cogency of the Islamic ontology of violence gained wider currency in the wake of the events of 9/11 after which commentators and observers from the West ventured into the job of exploring the scriptural foundations of Islam’s advocacy of violence, to provide credence to their thesis that disruptive behavior among Muslims is religiously ordained to them.

The West has constantly endeavored to re-establish this thesis, and the widespread anguish generated due to the paranoid violence unleashed by the non-state transnational Jihadist groups who claim to fight the West and other non-Islamic beliefs to revive the golden age of Islam has emerged as a puissant corroboration to sustain such efforts. In the wake of intense anti-West extremism fomented by Islamic radicals, the dissemination of Western defense of its own civilization and a popular condemnation of the Islamic culture through its transmitting agents has reached the acme. As a foil to this, the covering of any act of terror involving Muslims by the media in the West is determined by an emphasis on Islamophobia that engages in the branding of Islam as a violent religion and Muslims as being Pseudonyms of terror (Said 1997: XXII). In this way, media has emerged as the latest inheritor of the whole repertoire of negative orientalism (Majid 2000: 50).

Bernard Lewis and the Imagery of Islamic History

The foundations of Samuel Huntington’s arguments can be traced in the views of historian Bernard Lewis. His clash of civilizations is a reinterpretation of Lewis’s notion of the same, embodied in the conception of the roots of Muslim rage. According to Bernard Lewis, many Muslims are returning to the classical Islamic view that the world and all mankind are divided into two: the house of Islam (dar al-Islam), where Islamic law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the house of unbelief or war (dar al-harb; Lewis 1990: 47). For Lewis, it is the ultimate duty of all Muslims to spread Islam through military as well as peaceful means till the entire world becomes dar al-Islam. In his projections of Islamic history, Lewis talks of a clash of civilizations that involves the people of the house of Islam who are venting their anger against the rest which, in this case, is the West, especially the USA (Ibid.). This clash for Lewis is rooted in the ‘dualist idea in Islam of a cosmic clash between good and evil, light and darkness, order and chaos, truth and falsehood, god and the adversary’ (Ibid.).

Such a Manichean clash in Islamic discourse for Lewis acquired political and military dimensions, which got crystallized into what he calls as the Muslim rage. In his views, the roots of this Muslim rage are embedded in three factors which according to Muslims have been adventitiously infused into the Muslim world by the non-Muslim world. They include, first, the decline of the medieval grandeur of Islamic imperial geography due to the expansion of Russia and the rise of European colonial empires. Second, the advent of Western ideas of modernity into the house of Islam, owing to which the third factor has emerged: the coming into the Muslim home, the emancipated women and rebellious children, who challenged the long-standing patriarchic orthodoxy, which forms the crucial substructure of the house of Islam.

The Muslim rage against these alien, infidel and incomprehensible forces, which subverted their dominance, disrupted their society and violated the sanctuary of their home, was thus inevitable. It was, hence, natural for the rage to be directed against the millennial enemy by drawing strength from ancient beliefs and loyalties. (Ibid.: 48)

Further, the primary question for Bernard Lewis has been: what went wrong with the Muslim civilization? (Lewis 2002: 43). In answering this question, Lewis states that the Islamic threat has been on the rise due to the upsurge in the various shades of Islamic movements. For him, religious authoritarianism is culturally inbuilt in Islam, and hence, democracy and Islam are incompatible to each other (Lewis 1994: 54–56). The doctrines of Islam promote tyranny because no legal procedure or apparatus was ever devised or set up for enforcing the law against the ruler (Lewis 1972: 33). He also makes a false generalization that Islam is not merely a religion but a political identity and allegiance that transcends all others (Lewis 1993: 154–156). Indicating that Islam formed the central element in the shaping of Muslim identity (Ibid.: 135). In support of this, it is argued that what makes political actions and choices recognizably Muslim is the way Islam provides the symbols in terms of which diverse Muslim groups define their identity as Muslims (Eickelman and Piscatori 1996: IX). Lewis further argues that in the pagan Rome, Caesar was god; in Christianity, there was a choice between Caesar and god, but in Islam, there has been no such choice. In the Islamic conception of polity, there is no Caesar, but only god, who is the sole sovereign and source of law (Lewis 1989: 40). With this, Lewis saw no distinction between spiritual and temporal authority in Islam.

Drawing heavily on these foundations, Huntington’s publications (Huntington 1993, 1996) acted not only as a vindication of this long-standing discourse of a relationship between Islam and the West which has been embedded in dichotomy, but they also projected persistence of the same in an even more apocalyptical manner. The events of September 11, which has left deep imprints of an apocalyptical horror in our collective memory (Baudrillard 2003: 29–30), emerged as a tangible expression and a denouement of this discourse of dichotomy (Mueller 2006). With this, the logic of Huntington’s thesis was considered to have come to a full circle (Mazrui 2004: 793). It was now regarded as a prognosis that materialized to rip the world into two parts, the Muslim civilization and others, who were placed in diametric opposition to it (Neumayer and Plumper 2009: 711). In this manner, Huntington’s idea struck a dark cord of popular simplicity, dividing the world into essentialized categories and reinforced the pathological status of the other (Barkey 2005: 6).

Thus, the framing of September 11 in the context of Islam as a religion and culture facilitated the West to brand Muslims as terrorists, traitors, non-democrats, and threats to social cohesion and global peace (Abrahamian 2003: 539). Such a pattern of branding was founded upon a popular discussion based on three assumptions. These are, first, that the intermingling of religion and politics is unique to Islam. Second, political Islam like Islam itself is monolithic. Third, political Islam is inherently violent (Ayoob 2008: 1). This popular debate led to the construction of the holy terror thesis with its central fascination with Islam as its primary locus, reflecting a political as well as a cultural antipathy toward Islam itself (Milton-Edwards 2006: 15).

Conclusion

An interdisciplinary epistemology based upon methodological pluralism will be in a position to recognize the existence of multiple ontologies factoring deeply in the process of the making of contemporary Islam. Such an epistemology would be equipped to acknowledge that Islamic behavior is multifarious and is reflected in the polycentric character of movements possessing multiple local colors. This epistemology can situate itself upon the contention that there is no single Islam and the multiple modes in which the religion manifests, owes itself to diverse historical, geographic, sociological, and political circumstances. However, as a marked contrast to this, when it actually comes to the critical question of locating the phenomenon of terrorism unleashed by Muslims, our experience has been that the broad understandings on Islam seem to become myopic. What then dominates is rather an Islamophobic lexicon that has largely arrogated the epistemological space meant for the definition of the place of Islam and Muslims in the social cartography of the world. The scholarship of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis falls in this category, as they demonize Islam with the use of a methodology that constructs an ontological linkage between Islam and violence. Impelled by the global turbulence engendered by the constant presence of multiple strands of transnational jihadi movements, the ideas of Huntington and Lewis have acted as Foucauldian epistemes and contributed significantly in the discursive formulation of the negative discourse on Islam and Muslims.

As a product of the demonization of Islam done by such Islamophobic scholarship, the identity of individuals of being Muslim does not remain merely as a part of normal religio-social process of primordialist structuration. Instead it becomes a complex phenomenon that gets inter-woven with intricate meanings for the followers of the faith. For instance, the semantic and semiotic signification of being a Muslim in the international arena, on the one hand, may thrust upon the Muslims, the burden of carrying the image of destroyer of world peace. At the level of polities on the other hand, Muslims are always liable to be looked at as barbaric individuals who are carrying a suspicious character. Symbolizing that words such as Muslims, mistrust, danger, and deceit have all become synonymous to each other. Such a scenario is the result of our failure to visualize Islam as a macro-social entity manifesting in multifarious forms which is receptive to the transformative power of eclectic micro-cultural contexts in which its believers are located. To further complicate the issue, the Islamophobic narratives concocted by scholars like Huntington and Lewis tend to construct the religion of Islam as a monolithic belief system which is governed by a set of stationary, intractable, and complex theological sanctions.